The Siren's Tale (7 page)

“
Admit it!” she cried.

“
You know it already.”

“
That is a dodge.”

Turning away from her blazing eyes, Harry strolled
to the open briefcase, where he pulled out a red velvet case and sauntered back with it.

“
Here is a peace offering. Will this trinket tide you over until after the weekend?” He took a pearl-and-aquamarine bracelet from the Cartier case.

“
These stones are the same color as your eyes, my love. Why are you behaving in this mulish way? You know I can't make it through the holidays without making love to you. So, can we now get on with it?”

While
Harry was fastening the bracelet around her wrist, Marlena's pulse was racing. Then she heard again that strange voice, so surreal and yet familiar.
Rule of thumb, dear: always take the jewelry.

Who is hearing things now? Was it the same voice she had heard in her dreams? Was the woman who sang to her the same one coaching her now—no, dragging her through this divisive scene? The simplest thing was to swallow the crumb her lover had
thrown her.

She murmured
, “Well, I guess we have time for a quickie.”

“
That's my girl!”

Pulling her onto the bed, Harry
caressed the tops of her thighs over her silk stockings.

“
What do you want? Tell me, lass.”

What she wanted was his passionate commitment to their escape and, beyond that, an explanation for what was going on. But she resigned herself, for the moment, to saying what he wanted to hear:
“Put your big cock in me, please.”

“
Not so fast.”

Crouching on the bed and lo
oking directly into her eyes, her lover placed his sensual lips on her labia, flicking the protruding clitoris with his tongue until it grew hot and hard. Then he lowered his shoulders and his head until his curly, black hair brushed her vagina. He lapped at her until she came the first time.

Later, as he rolled away from her
, Harry said, “Keep that bauble out of sight downstairs, will you, lass?  I don't want to hear about it from Lila.”

That night,
Marlena dreamed she was in the parlor at Mill's Creek. A strange young man, a miner covered in coal dust from head to foot, was on one knee before her with his cap in his hand. He begged her to end her affair with Mr. Drake.

She awoke alone and in a sweat, her heart palpitating.

“I'll never give up Harry,” she muttered fiercely. “No matter what happens. Never.”

But we elder sirens are not about to give up either
. Game on.

“
Why all the secrecy about your mother, Chloe?” Marlena asks as they prepare to move inside.

Chloe pauses at the French doors. Her platinum bob is dusted with newly fallen snow. She wonders whether there will be a storm. On last winter's solstice, a thirty-nine-inch snowfall was recorded on Hatter's Field overnight.

“Basically, I promised mother I wouldn't tell her story until after she passed away.”

“
Well, that makes sense. Looking forward to tonight?”

“
Somewhat.”

“
Usually the patient talks and you are on the receiving end of confessions. I'll bet it will feel strange, sharing your deepest, darkest family secrets after all these years.” 

“
You don't know the half of it,” Chloe murmured.

In mentally
preparing for the long night ahead, Chloe has spent hours in meditation, forcing herself to revisit a well-concealed story in her own life. She had a short, but life-changing involvement in 1942 with eighteen-year-old Austin Bellum in California. It had happened before Austin became engaged to Faith Zanelli and went off to war.

T
he family curse her mother so often warned her about forbade a connection between a Zanelli woman and a man with even a drop of Drake blood.  The Bellums of Alta and the Drakes of Scotland shared a common ancestor. Angus Drake was a horse thief and roustabout who came to the territory after disownment by his Scottish clan. He became a man of property by hooking up with William Stewart, a perspicacious Scot who foresaw a future in Wyoming for big-game recreation. Angus married into a nondescript family of Alta homesteaders, the Bellums, who originally were goat herders. 

But despite the prohibition against a
Zanelli-Drake pairing and whether through chemistry or the machinations of the family curse, Chloe was inexplicably overcome by an urge to end her chastity streak and copulate with the younger man who sometimes handled horses for her in Alta. She succumbed to impulse on a spring night in a San Diego parking lot after she and Austin met up quite by chance. Austin was at training school, preparing for war deployment in the Army Air Corps, and Chloe was staying with theatrical friends of her mother. Under the stars, Austin's eager voice seemed to vibrate with the timbre of an angel's. But the organic sounds of sex, as the airman lost his virginity to the older woman, were embarrassing to them both. Neither was looking forward to a second act.

Then Chloe's
second cousin, Faith Zanelli, entered the picture. Faith had written to Chloe that she was stationed in San Diego with the Women's Marine Corps. Chloe tracked her down and added her to their company. Arm-in-arm, the three strolled through Balboa Park and drank copious amounts of beer.

The night before going overseas, Austin impulsively proposed marriage to Faith. Impressed by the sky warrior, but more keenly motivated by a desire to impress her brilliant older cousin, Faith accepted. There were conditions: Austin must travel to Saratoga after the war, formally get permission from Tomas
Zanelli, and promptly convert to Catholicism.

Two months later, having discovered she was pregnant, Chloe could see no alternative except to end
her pregnancy. She sought an abortion from the friend of a friend, whose clumsy work cost her the ability to bear more children.

As Chloe and
Marlena take up their respective positions in Cassandra's old bedroom, Chloe, though not religiously inclined, is praying to whatever forces govern the universe that she will not be obliged to share this particular story with Marlena. It is the one secret she has kept from her mother, who always believed her daughter's childlessness was a perverse choice, a rationalist's desire to put an end to siren births.

Cassandra's old bedroom holds more charm than the two
larger guest suites down the hall put together. The whimsical touches to the wainscoting and sheer draperies are complemented by a lovely view from the window, which overlooks the dried creek, small pond, horse paddock, and Chloe's vegetable garden, protected with large sheets of plastic from the ravages of winter storms. Annie Witherspoon, Chloe's Native American housekeeper and companion of many years, has engineered the furnishings into a state of fanciful comfort. There is a cozy old horsehair armchair for Chloe to perch on. The radiator hisses merrily, working over-time to heat the frigid air, while in the background is an indistinct
plink-plink-plink
as the ghost strums the strings of her zither.

Chloe
feels like Hamlet, about to stage a play with an explosive hidden agenda. Dressed in a long white nightgown, her amber eyes glittering, the scientist/rationalist looks like the siren that she knows herself to be.

She says to
Marlena, “Comfy, dear?”  

Marlena's
stocking feet dangle across the open end of the one-armed divan. As she lays back, her burnished hair fans out in a crinkly, red-gold halo against the pillowed, rounded arm. The divan, which once belonged to Cassandra, was refurbished in 1969. Marlena replaced the dark, skinny legs with four butternut wooden balls and covered the curvy silhouette in a light gray silk fabric lined with thin stripes of lavender and pale peach. 

She pulls the fur afghan tightly around her neck and sighs contentedly.

“Perfetto.”

The window curtains shift, the plinking sounds cease, and the long-awaited tale begins.

With the tip of one gloved finger, Cassandra Vye traced two sets of initials on the cold, wet casement window in her bedroom: CV + CD. She put her grandfather's spyglass to one topaz eye and scanned the empty, vast immensities of Hatter's Field. To her view, it appeared barren and immovable, as if nothing had ever changed here since the days of the glaciers, when woolly mammoths roamed the arid plain.

She often stood so
, looking out the window and playing on her zither, meanwhile envisioning herself driving away from Alta—far, far away. With the exception of the time spent in her lover's arms, this year seemed the dreariest of her twenty years on the planet.

The
promontory of the Hat was within easy walking distance along Hatter's Field. From the vantage point of the Hat and with the help of her grandfather's spyglass, she would be able to see activities at the hotel and in the village. She put on her bonnet and pulled on her gloves, too restless not to venture out again. Tonight, more than ever before, she wanted her lover to respond to her siren's song. 

At last twilight was approaching, and the gas lam
ps of Alta’s settlers were coming on. The stars sprinkled across the sky and the home fires in the little mountain town appeared to converge in the emptiness where mountains end and the high plain begins. The scene was reminiscent of her arrival a year before, just rounding the bend in the road from the south in a small brown surrey, how she had strained forward with great excitement to catch a first glimpse of Alta, where she would soon be seen in her best lace-fringed bonnet. She was unaware it would be hanging unused, day after day, on a crude nail by a raw wooden door.

Progress had been slow behind the tired, single horse plodding along the lonely, narrow road past Hatter's Field. On each side of the muddy thoroughfare were frozen sheets of snow, layer upon layer, as far as the eye could see, and a dark, brooding mountain towering over the town like a pitiless, ancient god.
The terrain she saw for the first time was constituted in a way so wild and resistant that even back in the greedy old homesteading days, no one had ever made a move to tame or claim it. The land had irregularities not caused by plows and pickaxes, but rather by the geology of the last climate change.

Flourishing
into young womanhood in the more densely populated East, Cassandra was a Progressivist in her political opinions and a restless spirit by virtue of her siren nature. As the short days turned bitterly cold, her initial enthusiasm for her new environment quickly waned. She could see how horribly isolated the town was under that endless, dark, unforgiving sky, and how reticent and backward the pious villagers were. Was there anyone here worthy of a siren's tricks, much less her passionate love? 

The native biddies were quick to pick up on Cassandra's aloofness, and almost immediately, the dazzling beauty
became a target for malicious gossip. People are apt to be suspicious of an exotic creature who sets herself apart from others, and there was no hiding herself from public scrutiny in such a tiny settlement. 

In 1900, even the largest Western towns consisted of no more than a thousand men, women, and children living
hand to mouth in pine cabins or frame clapboards. A handful of shops provided the necessities: saddle and leather goods, hardware, dry goods, barber-dentist, cobbler, blacksmith, and butcher. As a rule, there were thirteen bars, one busy local jail, and sometimes a church. 

However, Wyoming was destined to be an exception to the rule. For one thing, it was a vast place that travelers crossed rather than staked claims to. In 1870, two years after the Wyoming Territory was carved out of the Dakota, Utah, and Idaho territories, the entire population reported by the census was 9,118.
Wyoming's northeastern-most district was exceptionally tiny, with a population of no more than 200 in the three villages combined.

The
“district,” as Alta, Bulette, and Corinthus were known collectively, also claimed the distinction of being an exception to the rule in regard to the aforementioned drinking establishments. Each village had a church, but among the three hamlets, only Alta, the tiniest of them, had a single combined inn and saloon. A society where church-going women dominated the social order rather than the saloon-keepers was an anomaly in the old West. In Alta, the natives' piety was particularly pronounced, a tradition passed down from a severely strict, “low” sect among the original homesteaders. Descendants of the original families who remained were the Brightons, Fairwells, Bottomlys, Harrisons, Simmonses, Hawkers, and Browns. They were a tightly knit group and as deeply resentful of outside influence as the Boxers in China.

Zelda Parker Brighton, the largest
landowner by virtue of being sole proprietor of the Brighton Grange and its ten thousand acres, was held in the highest respect, and she intended to keep it that way. Widow Brighton was a proud descendent of Reverend Samuel Parker, a famous missionary in the territory. Her great-aunt was Esther Morris, a woman from South Pass who, for the first time ever in human history, was made a female justice of the peace. Widow Brighton came by her scrupulous pride honestly.

Because of the strictness of the Methodist denomination, the
structure of Alta's church was plain and had no steeple. The itinerant pastor was a quiet man with a plain wife and three small, solemn children.

N
ot fifty yards from the graveyard of the church stood The Plush Horse Inn & Saloon. A ten-foot music box in one drafty corner also made it the district's sole entertainment center. Innkeeper/owner Augustus “Curly” Drake was a newcomer. Initially viewed with suspicion and alarm, he was duly reported to have attended a prestigious school in Scotland, and his deceased father, it was said, was once president of the Colorado Silver Mines.

As the
handsome bachelor held a law degree and owned property, the outsider became a subject of intense interest among the unmarried native daughters. However, in the eyes of the original homesteaders, Drake's eligibility was marred by an inexpugnable black mark. He never attended church in Alta and rarely mixed with his own Scottish denomination in Bulette. Every citizen was expected to attend church on Sundays. The sole exceptions were the native sons who were having their hair cut by Harold Fairwell.

Fairwell
, by trade a busy cobbler, performed the barbering service free of charge, regardless of the weather, on the first Sunday of each month. Fairwell claimed Sunday was the only day of the week he could afford to make his services available. Wives grumblingly looked the other way as their husbands used the excuse, once every month, to miss church and catch up on gossip.

Men and women alike had a legitimate need for gossip, as n
ews traveled very slowly in the district. Sometimes not knowing social trends back East led to outright disaster. For example, the Western trappers were unaware of the decline in fashion of the beaver hat among Eastern gentlemen, a societal change which decimated the fortunes of most mountain men in the 1840’s. The assassination of President McKinley in Buffalo the following September would not be heard of in Alta until Christmas, because a telegraph line was down. And when the state legislature passed an anti-gambling bill late in 1901, no one in the back room of the Plush Horse Saloon would pay any attention whatsoever until 1906, when the inn was sold to an out-of-town interest.

To get the news of the day and a free cup of coffee,
Fairwell and other men of business congregated each morning at Bottomly's Butcher Shoppe. For the purposes of gossip and news dissemination, however, there was nothing better than a series of evening bonfire celebrations held at the end of October, on Thanksgiving, and on Christmas night. Fire Nights, as they were called, were the time-honored, surefire occasions to find out who was traveling south to Casper or east to Rapid City, and whose husband had been spotted making cow eyes at Diane, the buxom barmaid at the Plush Horse.  

The
bonfire tradition went back a century or more to rituals of the local tribes, first the Shoshone, and later the Lakota Sioux. They used the base of the Hat—an elevated portion of Hatter's Field that looked like a miniature version of Devil's Tower—as a place to worship their nature gods. The Indians would set ablaze pine logs and sagebrush, dancing solemnly around the bonfires in a pattern that gave pause to white settlers who knew of the Ghost Dancers. But by the dawn of the twentieth century, the wars between the Indians and the whites had died out. Now the practice of lighting bonfires was an excuse among the pious white homesteaders for a rare night of debauchery. 

The First Fire Night of October 27, 1900,
was very special indeed, since it marked the first of the new century. The highpoint would be fiddle music and dancing after the first bonfire was lit at the base of the Hat.

As was customary, t
he exact locations and times for the firings were announced in church. The order was strictly followed, a throwback to earlier notions about appeasing a nature god. By sunset the male citizens of Alta, Bulette, and Corinthus had already collected brush and bundled faggots in all the outlying hamlets and neighborhoods.

The men
would use a firing technique that resembled a modern telephone chain, lighting the first bonfire at the Hat at precisely nine o'clock. The first would be quickly answered by a second, a third, and so forth, until all the fires were raging.

Sometimes there were as many as
thirty, sometimes as few as eight, depending on the bitterness of the weather. The quickness of the teams in firing up would be a matter for bragging rights, as was the size of a particular fire, its color, and its visibility from miles away. The bonfires would be manned for several hours by boys and men, attracted by virtue of a foolish willingness to risk their lives to keep up the longest fire. Lightning strikes were very common up at the Hat and along Alta Mountain.

As to the color
, it was generally agreed the prettiest fire to be seen was at Mill's Creek Pond, which was graced by a large grove of junipers. What a disappointment, then, when Captain Vye announced he was declining to participate! 

“
There will be no bonfire at Mill's Creek Pond tonight,” Captain Marcus Vye intoned. It was four o'clock, and the men had gathered at Bottomly's to escape the bustle of activities and nagging voices of their wives.  General hissing and groaning ensued.

He held up his hand, then explained that his treasured supply of juniper logs was being saved for another occasion. At the third Fire Night on Christmas evening, he planned to host a ball in honor of his grand
daughter Cassandra, who had graced his bachelor residence since fall of 1899.  He wanted his Christmas bonfire to be the longest fire ever seen in the district.

None believed him, as the Captain had never yet played the host at his stone home. Later and to a select few, Captain
Vye offered a different reason for refusing to participate. He confessed an ancestress had been hastily tried and then burned at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts for the crimes of adultery and witchcraft. She was burned at sunset on the Feast of All Hallowed Souls’ Eve. “I swear to you,” he said, “her only sin was unusual beauty, which excited the jealousy of the local matrons.”

“
To honor her memory,” the Captain said solemnly, “I vowed there would never be fires set on Vye property at Halloween, for fear of arousing a vengeful ghost. I don't mind, though, if the young people want to caper around the bonfire at the Hat, or if my pretty granddaughter wants to dance among 'em. You've never seen anyone dance better.”

The native grapevine buzzed with that story, and not a few had a laugh at his expense.  E
veryone knew Vye's granddaughter was a standoffish snob, that the outsider's beauty and consummate musical skill were not the virtues valued in a native woman; those were community spirit, self sacrifice, and fervent religious piety. Others assumed the story about a Salem witch in the Captain's family was a tall tale meant to compete with their stories in Halloween ghoulishness.

However, those who took the tale at face value buzzed the loudest and the longest.  Thenceforth, these natives believed the name of
Vye was associated with witchcraft.

At sundown,
young and old alike were fighting for turns in the bathtub. The soaking was followed by the braiding or slicking of hair, and then began the arduous process of layering on clothing that would both hold up against the chilly night air and also fit the occasion. A gaily-colored ribbon was added to a bonnet, or a fringed leather jacket was put on over breeches and homespun cotton shirts. Young children donned skeleton masks and ghoulish capes, and small boys smeared soot on their faces, brandishing wooden swords, pitchforks, and broomsticks as they went out the door for a night of fearsome revelry.

The older settlers looked forward to a full night of gossip. The weather was sure
to be a major topic of conversation, but the choicest of all morsels to chew over would be the secret wedding—nothing more savory!

Wor
d had gotten out that the long delayed union between the innkeeper and the widow's niece had taken place that morning in Corinthus, the furthest north of the three villages that were strung like beads along the high neckline of tall, brooding Alta Mountain.

It was a stunning report. Six months before, Widow Brighton had stood up in church and forbidden the
banns on the grounds Drake was not a practicing Christian. Since then, Curly Drake had been the butt of the native sons' jokes.